Department of Liturgical Music, Orthodox Church in America, 1977
(The following is an edited version of a wonderful, informative article found on oca.org. For the sake of space some introductory material has been deleted. We encourage everyone, however, to read the entire article at their convenience. Given the central place of acapella music in the Orthodox Church – its history and often complexity – we thought the following might be of benefit.)
The Christian practice of worship included sacred music from the very beginning. At the Lord’s Supper when our Lord Jesus instituted the Mystery of His precious Body and Blood, He and His disciples sang a hymn before they departed to the Mount of Olives (Matthew 26:30, Mark 14:26). And Saint Paul, writing to the “faithful saints” in Ephesus, advised: “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart.” (Ephesians 5:18-19).
The early Christians simply continued the Judaic heritage of chanting psalms, adding gradually new hymns which were specifically Christian in content. The notion that sacred music developed only after the age of the early Church persecutions is quite erroneous. In fact, it was through psalms and hymns that the intense band of the faithful expressed their strength and joy in the risen Lord during those long years of persecution. (The first three hundred years of the Church’s existence is often referred to as The Age of Martyrdom.) When the Church finally did emerge from that difficult era, its music continued and flourished as before.
During the age of the Seven Ecumenical Councils (4th-8th Centuries), music in the Church received its definitive structure and character. Some of the cleverer heretics in that era knew well the power of music to capture human hearts. They shrewdly expressed their false doctrines in lively, catchy melodies which spread quickly among the people. But the character of the tunes, consonant with the falsity of their content, echoed the music of the theater and circus. In opposition to the heretics, the Church Fathers formulated guidelines for the music to be used in Orthodox worship. The main features of Orthodox sacred music defined during the Great Councils are still the canonical norms for church music today. They are outlined as follows:
FEATURES OF SACRED MUSIC:
First and most obviously, the music is purely vocal. No accompanying organ or other instruments are used. The human voice alone glorifies God. There are a number of reasons for this. During the formative years of the Church, the organ, along with other musical instruments, were associated with the theater and circus; they evoked the whole atmosphere of pagan frivolity and licentiousness for the Christian. Even in the Western Church until the 15th Century instruments were not permitted. As late as the 16th Century in the West, the organ was hardly more than tolerated, the music being still mainly a cappella.
The deeper objection to instruments was that their use was considered not consonant with the spiritual nature of Christian worship. In the past Jewish worship had included them, but only as an accommodation to human weakness, to the spiritual imperfection of the man under the old Law. St. John Chrysostom said in this regard: “David formerly sang in psalms, we today also sing with him; he had a lyre with lifeless strings, the Church has a lyre with living strings. Our tongues are the strings of the lyre, with a different tone, indeed, but with a more accordant piety.”1 Christian worship is higher and more perfect by virtue of the perfect revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Musical instruments are of the imperfect realm of “this world”; they are lifeless, mechanical and ostentatious; they introduce into the character of the services a contrived, sensuous, theatrical element. The lyre of “living strings,” the pure human voice because of its flexibility, its warmth and the deep feeling it can express, is the sole worthy instrument in the more perfect worship of the “New Israel.” Jesus Christ has inaugurated a new age, the New Creation where the faithful now worship in “spirit and truth” (John 4:23-24).
The second main characteristic is that the music, being wholly vocal, is completely wed to the text. The text, in fact, is paramount, the words and their meaning suggesting the very contour and rhythm of the music. Since the Orthodox Church knows of no sacred music without words, it is from the text and for the text that the melody proceeds. The music is a holy chant, not measured by any regular or contrived meter. There are, therefore, in Orthodox musical history, no hymn-writers who were simply professional musicians; they were rather liturgical poets whose basic task was neither music nor poetry, but prayer. They were without exception ascetical, mystical fathers. And the content of their hymnology is never subjective, but rather objective declarations of Orthodox doctrine. Each verse, each tropar, each stichera, is a marvelous poetic statement of the Faith. The services, especially Vespers and Matins, are replete with these hymns “strung together with Glorias and broken verses from the psalms like pearls on a string.”2 Even in the rarer cases where the personal pronoun “I” appears (as more often in the Lenten Triodion), the hymns maintain their basic objectivity.
Just as there is no liturgical music without words, so too there are during worship no words without music. Besides the formal hymnology itself, everything else is chanted “psalmodically” — all psalms, all readings, all prayers, the Creed, everything. The phenomena in American churches of reading in an unpitched monotone or in a dramatic voice, or of congregational recitation of portions of the services are influences from Protestant worship, having no basis or precedent in the whole history of Orthodox corporate worship…
Two aspects of Orthodox sacred music which have all but fallen out of use in American parishes must also be mentioned. The first is: singing antiphonically. The practice of two choirs singing alternately is a tradition which became firmly established in the early Church. It has both practical and spiritual advantages. Practically, it enables the chanters to sing a long time without fatigue since they alternately sing and rest throughout the services. And spiritually this practice brightens and enlivens the services, keeping the congregation, as Constantine Cavarnos points out, “in a state of inner wakefulness.”3
Secondly, though much of the liturgical music in use in Orthodox Churches today is harmonized, the traditional Byzantine and early Slavic chants were monophonic with the addition at times of the drone or holding note. Polyphony appeared in Russia in the late 16th Century as a natural development of the Russian musical “soul” and paralleled the pattern of the multi-voiced folk singing. Later the harmonies became more sophisticated as professionally-trained composers harmonized chants and wrote original music of a high degree of esthetic beauty. The process, however, became more and more dominated by “western” influence and opened the door to music-for-music’s sake. Those who continue to argue for strict monophonic chant assert that harmony destroys the purity, holiness, and power of the simple chant. Those who prefer harmonized music insist that there is the possibility of simple part-singing which is not ostentatious, and which has, moreover, the effect of highlighting and beautifying the chant and its text. Each side argues that its method has greater transforming power in the hearts of worshippers. The controversy cannot be settled here. Perhaps the solution is in keeping both traditions, depending on the character of each individual chant. Harmonized or not, all sides agree that church music is most effective when it is uncomplicated and directly expressive of both the text and the liturgical moment.
Throughout the unbroken history of the Orthodox Church, whether or not these basic features of sacred music have been fulfilled totally in every local church, the ideals stand as a guide for all to follow. No individual, no local community has the right to abridge or ignore these canonical standards. Each generation must embrace anew the wisdom of the musical tradition, so that church singing may continue to fulfill (or return to) its proper and sacred role in public worship. Such a fulfillment, as this essay has attempted to show, is a fulfillment of the very nature of music. And it is the nature of music to draw mortals to the immortal Throne of God where all harmony and beauty have their beginning and end.
REFERENCES
1 Quoted in The Story of Christian Hymnody, E.E. Ryden, Augustana Press, Rock Island, Ill., 1959, p. 7.
2 R.M. French, The Eastern Orthodox Church, Hutchinson University Library, London, 1961, p. 124.
3 Constantine Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Music, Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, Boston, 1956, p. 25.